Unity, the company behind the game engine of the same name, has released version 2020. 2. In addition to innovations for the graphic rendering, the development team behind the game engine is also updating its tools and revising the artist, team and editor workflows. The release also focuses on increasing performance.

Unity 2020 .2 is the second of the Tech Stream releases planned for this year. In January 2020 Unity announced that it would deliver two instead of three releases per year. This is associated with longer alpha and beta phases to ensure a more stable core engine. Further functions are to follow as modular packages.

New for the URP and HDRP pipelines beginning of April 2020 Unity had published a timetable for the year 2020. This included changed offers for live content as well as information on the Unite Now digital program series. The focus was on stability, performance and ensuring smooth workflows. This is where Unity 2020. 2 connects. The update extends the Universal Render Pipeline (URP) with new functions and brings it closer to parity with the built-in render pipeline. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) is intended to improve the quality of the ambient lighting in the scene. The development team behind the game engine is introducing a new complex lit shader that allows developers to reduce the size in build data and load time. In addition, with the update it is possible to use Clear Coat Maps to simulate materials such as car paint.

Also the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) With Unity 2020. 2 new tools have been added to help developers debug the lighting. In addition, the development team worked on the decal system. Path tracking supports mist absorption and subsurface scattering for organic materials. A new mode for depth of field can generate path-traced images with high-quality defocus blur (unsharpness). Unity 2020. 2 has an HDRP sample scene in its luggage, which already contains some setups of the physically based light intensities. This should give developers a good starting point for creating realistic scenes with HDRP.

Updated tools for workflows The Current version of the game engine has been revised for all artist workflows. The updated tools give developers the ability to create cinematics and other video and film content. For example, with the revision of the performance of the graph editor, the update extends the shader graph with new functions, which in turn should improve the workflows for technical artists. The VFX has been expanded to include output events, which should enable users to synchronize lights, sound, physical reactions or gameplay based on spawn events via a delegate interface in C #.

But not only that The update focuses on optimizing artist workflows. There are also innovations for work processes in teams and in the editor of the game engine: Unity Hub version 2.4.2 brings, for example, revised workflows for managing projects, downloads, Unity editor versions and modules. Among other things, a new feature is a quick search with which developers can search through all scenes and prefabs of their projects at once without being limited to open scenes.

Unity currently recommends version 2019 Long-Term Support (LTS) for developers looking for maximum stability. Unity announces the next LTS version, Unity 2020, for spring 2021. Those interested can find more information about the current release of the game engine in the post on the Unity blog.

(mdo)